Pohutukawa trees – shore sentinels as the day fades – the spirit of home, always.
Art Ascending
“Art, when inspired with love, leads to higher realms”
– Baba Meher
Two community art gallery stairways, in NZ’s Nelson (left) and Taumaranui (right), echo the above quote.
You can feel the love and passion transforming humble carpentry.
Stairs inviting you upwards with rainbow colours to discover more artful wonder.
Which is what inspired art does, I suppose – takes you out of yourself and beyond.
I fumble around with this blog, and I don’t really know what qualifies as ‘good’ art ,but I have come to learn that the act of creating something that is real to me has actually taken me ‘beyond’. The creativity of others (bloggers like you included!) inspires that journey too.
Onwards and upwards!
Whare Iti (Little House)
Cool little Maori storehouse at Orakei Marae in Auckland.
An original ” tiny house “(before they were trendy) ,but with striking ,elaborate carved frontage that no price could be put on.
Quite possibly the best mattress storage space in the world!
Battered Protector
Wooden groyne at a small beach on Auckland’s Tamaki River.
Groynes are structures that are supposed to prevent shoreline erosion by trapping sand and sediment moved by sea tides.
Pretty evidently,this specimen has seen better days.
Years of protecting the shore against wind and waves have taken a toll. Bits of the structure are gone but it still protects the coast.
Parallel with humans exist – worn down,carers and protectors amongst us can eventually suffer from “compassion fatigue” ,and worse.
If that sounds like you, please remember to shore up your own timbers before fighting the tide -take care of yourself as a priority!
No Mistake
“Without music, life would be a mistake”
– Friedrich Neitzsche
Real Good, For Free
“He was playing real good, for free”
– Joni Mitchell, ‘For Free’.
The busker in the Joni song played the clarinet, and the songwriter expressed her admiration of the player’s skills.
Not just that he played for free, or maybe a few coins thrown into a hat – but that he was truly free to express himself, and not trapped by the machinery of the music business that she was in.
The guy in the photo, playing a community piano in Atlanta a couple of years ago when I was there, was like that. Melodies played for himself, mainly.
I’d seen someone else doing the same thing earlier that day – see Butterfly Piano Man. Never come across the concept of the community piano before, and adored it!
Both gentlemen gave me random, life-affirming moments as they played – real good, for free.
Surrender Feathers
Something wild, and wise:
“Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”
– Rumi
Fighting life continuously can leave one a little bashed up.
Or even totally.
At that point maybe it is time for a different approach…
Last Light Mangrove Creek
Avicennia marina,salty tidal water and a sinking sun… a perfect combination really…
Joy Of Moving Water
“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
– Rumi, excerpt from ‘Moving Water’
Magic Bus
” Every day you’ll see the dust
as I drive my baby in my Magic Bus
( too much, Magic Bus ).”
– ‘Magic Bus’, The Who (1968)
…these days the dust might be more over this derelict carrier, than from it, but still magic..
Wooden Flower
Contemporary Pasifika carved artwork catches the sun on a building exterior in Auckland yesterday.
An enclosed flower at the centre of the design ,lines radiating outwards.
Abstract symbols that spoke to me yesterday of gratitude and hope.
That may or may not be what was intended by the carver.
Beauty in the eye of the beholder ,and so forth.
In the same way ,the power of symbols lies in simple representations, over which we overlay the complex realities of our own lives.
Condensed and visible symbols help us more easily make sense of our world.
If you could express who you are ,or maybe just the day you are having, as a symbol, what would it be?
Castle On The Cheap Side
Faded grandeur on Auckland’s Dominion Road.
Faux castle battlements above the proud name,’Cheapside’.
Peeling grey paint.
A bit down at the heel maybe.
Probably not the future imagined at the laying of its foundations.
But still standing,useful and with purpose after the best part of a century.
Some of us are like this battling building, battered but not broken(alliteration alert!).
And still dreaming of being castles…
Commemorate or Celebrate?
A plaque commemorates historical New Zealand events of the mid-19th century that were either righteous protest or causing insurrection, depending on your viewpoint.
A Maori leader, Hone Heke, and his followers ,repeatedly chopped down flagpoles flying the British flag.
And so the story is preserved.
But not celebrated necessarily – ill-feeling can still be stirred up by the story.
I recently had the privilege to draw up a will for a woman who adamantly wanted her funeral to be “a happy party.” That got written in, as she wished.
Which made me wonder, when it is our own turn to go ,will be our lives be celebrated or merely commemorated?
Still Moment
“I get these fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness – and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, I’m a human trying to make it through in this world”
– Ellen DeGeneres
Between Bush And Sky
Nice juxtaposition of humanity and nature – sleek, linear monolith up against swirls of bushland and pastel evening skies.
For mine,the house is like a vain attempt to impose order on the uncontrollable…
Water Lilies III
Everybody wants to be happy, right? But you cannot be happy all the time.
Serenity is probably a more desirable and realistic place to inhabit as much as you can.
It connotes calmness and acceptance. Happiness may stem from serenity, but not necessarily.
I am drawn to water lilies as a symbol of serenity.
It’s probably why my first ever post, Water Lilies I ,had that subject. To be honest, I just dipped into my photo stash to find something to put up and figure out how to work this WordPress blog gig. But it was the thing that initially came to me, for whatever reason.
Here is another post of the circular, floating marvels: Water Lilies II
I love the way they sit over a fluid, shifting surface. Transcending their environs.
And not just floating, but flowering sometimes.
Beautiful flowers.
Serenity.
Deeply Rooted
Pictured is the impressive visible roots system of a Moreton Bay Fig. Massive, sculptural things – and that’s only what you can see.
By way of contrast, a recent storm pulled up a shallow – rooted olive tree in my backyard and deposited it over the clothes line.
It takes a storm to finds out what your foundation is like.
Like a tree, if we are not deeply rooted we are deeply rooted (that is not a circular nonsense, as I mean the second “rooted” in the Australian / NZ vernacular meaning, “screwed”or “f**ked”).
That means knowing what your mainly silent, often invisible core really is all about and where you have come from.
I hope that you are totally rooted in the more positive sense of the word…
Mind The Gap
I don’t mind, actually.
No, not the sort of gap pictured – that could end a little messily at the wrong time.
I mean the hiatus; the space in between; the fallow period – call it what you will.
Elsewhere on this site I have explored whether being in that place ,willingly or not, is such a bad thing. See Hiatus (Never Mind The Gap!) and In Transition ,for example.
In the not too distant past, I found myself in a major life hiatus. At first I resented being in nowhere land(or at least that was how I saw it to be ). There were none of the usual markers and signifiers that routine and being busy, busy offered.
What I slowly grasped was that there I did not need to prove anything to anyone, did not to need to analyse the situation, or agonise over what was next .In fact I just had to – be. That was uncomfortable for me but massively liberating in the end.
New things and miracles happened without me chasing them. This blogsite is not named accidentally.
It’s often said that we learn most from adversity or our mistakes,and that may be often true. However I think that the real progress is made in the “after space” of those things .
Self-realisation and change occur in that gap in events where motion stops, and we have time and permission to rest with our being and the universe.
You just can’t squeeze that shit in walking to the shops or in a coffee break between jobs….
Beautiful And Terrible Things
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
-Frederick Buechner
…and sometimes those things are one and the same…but never be fearful, like the man says.
PS: Bonus points for spotting the evil and laughing double-faced gargoyle plant flower.
As You Get To It
A beautiful scene on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
But fraught with obstacles – countless rocks, the incessant surf ,tidal rips and undulating topography.
Were you to venture to the headland in the distance, that would pretty much be your lot the entire way.
Challenging, yes?
Consider this,from American inventor Joy Mangano:
“Overcome obstacles one at a time. Sometimes the end goal becomes too daunting, so take things one step at a time and overcome each one as you get to it.”
I recently watched the 2015 movie ‘Joy’,loosely based on her life, as the protagonist battled continual setbacks and frustrations to market( of all freaking things) a revolutionary mop to the masses.
Certainly an eye opener on how to tackle obstacles. I winced every time things went pear-shaped, but she got what she wanted eventually.
Most worthwhile journeys we would probably never embark on if we could see at the outset all the barriers and pitfalls that we would encounter .
Joy’s simple mantra is the only realistic way to reach our dream destination.
ebb then flood 